Thursday, April 23, 2009

Vancouver artist Reece Terris is in the process of putting together a set of apartments (designed by decade from 1950 to now) that will rise up through the centre of the Vancouver Art Gallery. I am looking forward to this (opens May 6).

Saturday, April 18, 2009

I watched The Professional for the first time about ten years ago, and I loved it. It's violent, but so stylized and gorgeously shot - watching it feels a little like watching a graphic novel. Léon (Jean Reno) is a hit man who lives alone in his New York apartment. Matilda (a stunning thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman) is a young girl whose family is gunned down in a drug dispute while she's at the grocery store. Léon takes Matilda in. Written and directed by Luc Besson (whose The Fifth Element is another of my 90s favourites), it is a sparing, brilliant film about what happens when something unexpected comes into our lives and changes our entire way of being in the world.

My hold came into the library the other day. Plot and Structure: techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers from start to finish, by James Scott Bell.

He begins by discussing the process by which he decided to take his writing seriously, which included obtaining a number of talismans: a poster of Stephen King, a black mug with the word writer stretched across it. He suggested posting something inspiring, so I immediately put down the book and started trolling the internet for quotes (I've always been a quote kind of girl). I found these ones here.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.- Jules Renard

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. - Emile Zola

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.- Gustave Flaubert

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. - Gaston Bachelard

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. - Raymond Chandler

Make it new.- Ezra Pound

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any. - Orson Scott Card

Saturday, April 11, 2009

I want to see (and hear) English as a second language once in a while - hear the things I never do because they are just part of the way I talk - the intricacies - the oddities. I want to think in the kind of poems I love - the ones that work words like the most delicate thread, looping around their meanings to create new ones, building words on words to create so many levels of understanding.